Page 10 - GALIET THE BEAUTIFUL FORMS PLATO IV++

Galiet & Galiet
“The story of particular facts [i.e. hypothesis] is as a mirror,
which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”20
Only the art of poetry, the very gift of the poetic imagination, is the genuine mirror that can perceive Beauty’s Beauty. It transforms and beautifies all distorted particular facts into their really real reality, not as shadows, not as appearances, or effigies or their mythoi cast in Plato’s twilight Den, but as things beautiful in themselves. Were Plato’s prisoners in the Den to behold Shelley’s mirror of the poetic imagination,21 they would cease to see the effigies as appearances and distortions of reality. They would not longer see Plato’s poetic-mimetic activity, a pure repetition and imitation of things, rather, they would see all things transform and be impregnated with the Form of the Beautiful.22
Plotinus, too, in Shelley’s airs, dignifies the place of art as capable of attaining the things-in-themselves. Yet Plotinus, unlike Shelley, never doubts art’s purely mimetic qualities. Plotinus in his Enneads23 refutes Plato’s lament, “none of our earthly poets has ever sung or ever will sing of the place beyond heaven with praises enough.”24 Plotinus interprets, or corrects Plato in an aspect that, in the end, becomes essential, and that Shelley will defend: the artist does not simply reproduce the thing contemplated; she directly reproduces the Ideas or Forms. 25 Plotinus like Shelley, will confront Plato by arguing from the transcendental. From this conviction, art will not only be tolerated as a lesser copy of the real-sensible, but it will be highly valued as the space of mediation between the reality of the Form or Idea and the sensible world, given that “Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense, but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.”26
The first conclusion from this interpretation by Plotinus, and later by Shelley, is that art (techne) is not essentially different from nature (physis): it is not its deficient and superfluous reproduction, but both have their immediate common ground in the very Ideas or Forms. Art can also beatify and beautify, embellish all natural elements precisely where beauty lacks. “Poetry,” extols Shelley, “turns all things to loveliness; it
exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.”27
20 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry. 978
21 Plato too speaks of a mirror. ‘The craftsman could make all these things...even you could make it quickly and in lots of places, especially if you were willing to carry a mirror with you, for that’s the quickest way of all. With it you can quickly make the sun, the things in the heavens, the earth, yourself, the other animals, manufactured items, plants, and everything else mentioned just now.’ Plato’s mirror differs from Shelley’s, it imitates, while Shelley’s immeasurable mirror of beauty, makes the distorted beautiful. Plato. Republic. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Book X. 596d.
22 To Plato, poetry is mimetic: a pure repetition of things repeating in turn the Ideas or Forms. His poetics of disdain appears in Book X. The poet thrice removed or furthest from the truth, is to be expelled from Plato’s ideal city. His imitations are vain and morally dangerous because they do not teach virtue. As a simulacrum of sensible experience, these mere images are vain inconsistent repetitions. As if reflected by a mirror, they distort and delude, and their multiplicities are a menace to society. It supposes the senseless proliferation of error, which his theory of Forms attempts to correct by making knowledge infallible.
23 Plotinus. The Enneads. On the Intellectual Beauty. V, 8, 1. Trans. by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. 411
24 Plato.Phaedrus.247c.
25 Plotinus. The Enneads. On the Intellectual Beauty. V, 8, 1. Trans. by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. 411
26 Plotinus. The Enneads. On the Intellectual Beauty. V, 8, 1. Trans. by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. 411
27 Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973. Shelley. A Defence of Poetry.
5
•10•